Moshe Zadka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 15 Nov 2000, Rob Tillotson wrote: > > Moshe Zadka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > This isn't true. Python 1.5.2-compiled extensions will work just fine > > > with Python 2.0. > > > > Hmm, they have changed the C API version several times in the past > > with minor releases, I guess it just didn't occur to me that there > > would be a major release without changes to it as well. > > The API changed, but AFAIK remained backwards-compatible.
How about the other way around? If the goal is to have 1.5.2 coexist with 2.0 on the same machine, this still presents a potential problem which will force packages to be dependent on one version or the other. If the goal is not coexistence, but simply transition, it really doesn't matter -- at some point everything will be moved to 2.0 anyway. > > Then we have no choice, all Python packages will have to depend on a > > specific version of Python and be installed under that version's > > library, no matter how the .pycs are supplied. > > Ugh! I was afraid you were going to say that. Another alternative, perhaps, would be to move to a system like the emacsen use -- that system solves a similar problem, namely that of alternative implementations of a particular kind of language interpreter that can share source code, but not byte-compiled files. Emacs add-ons are packaged as elisp source which is placed in a common location, then the infrastructure in the emacsen-common package compiles the source using each installed emacs. A Python version of this could work almost exactly the same way. Packages would contain only the .py files, and put them in some neutral location like /usr/share/python/site-packages. At install time, a bit of infrastructure would first make a tree of symlinks inside /usr/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages pointing to the source files, then would compile them into .pyc and .pyo. Of course, this is a solution for long-term coexistence, not for just a transition from one major version to the next. It's probably overkill for the current situation... --Rob -- Rob Tillotson N9MTB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
